Union With David Olusoga
Sign in to watch this content please.
- Episode
- Episode 2 - Creating Britishness
- Broadcast Info
- 2023 (59 mins)
- Description
- In the second episode in the series, historian David Olusoga reveals how in the Eighteenth Century a new British identity was forged in the face of multiple threats and almost constant war with France. After the Acts of Union were passed in 1707 the new union joining England and Wales with Scotland was far from secure. In 1713 a vote in Westminster to repeal the act was defeated by only four votes. And opposition was strong elsewhere. From Scotland rebellions were launched by the Jacobites - those who wanted to depose the new King, George I, and return the Catholic Stuart dynasty to the throne. They had support from France and Spain, Britain’s Catholic enemies, as well as many influential aristocratic Scottish families. One of these powerful Jacobite families, the Drummonds, lived at Strathallan Castle in Perthshire. David follows in this family’s footsteps through the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, which left patriarch William Drummond dead, his wife Margaret in prison, and the Jacobite army defeated. Meanwhile by the 1770s London was becoming the most dynamic city in the world drawing in money and talent from across the four nations. And amongst those who went there to make their fortune, David discovers Robert and Henry Drummond, children of the Jacobite rebels William and Margaret. Historian Andrew Mackillop reveals that the Drummond brothers had not only left behind their home country, but were now working closely with their parents’ opponents. Having made huge sums in banking, the Drummonds were now lending money to King George III whose father their family had attempted to overthrow a generation earlier. And the Drummonds’ home nation of Scotland was also being transformed by the Act of Union. Scottish negotiators in 1707 had requested access to England’s vastly lucrative overseas colonies and plantations as part of the deal uniting the two countries. These colonies soon began generating huge sums for Scotland, just as they had done for England. By the 1780s the city of Glasgow, which benefited from the trade winds which took ships from the Clyde, had become the epicentre of tobacco imports into Britain and made fortunes for the ‘tobacco lords’, the Glasgow families who derived their income from the trade. The grand mansions of these families still line some of Glasgow’s streets, but the wealth that built them came from the labour of those they enslaved in the plantations of America and the Caribbean. Across the Irish Sea, Dublin was also booming economically but the historic divisions between Protestants and Catholics were still strong. The French Revolution in 1789 inspired some to try to unite Protestants and Catholics and overthrow British rule in Ireland. In 1798 a rebellion was launched, supported by Britain’s arch-enemy France. After the rebels’ defeat the British Government decided that only an act of union with Ireland could ultimately secure their borders. In order to achieve this, Britain needed MPs in the Irish Parliament in Dublin to vote themselves out of existence. In the archives David uncovers recently discovered documents from the British Secret Service. They reveal evidence that the British government secretly paid money in a clandestine effort to swing the vote their way. In 1801 Ireland’s parliament was closed and a new state was created: the Union of Great Britain and Ireland. Meanwhile war with France continued. David travels to the French port of Boulogne-sur-Mer, to visit a fort built by Napoleon as he assembled a huge invasion force to attack Britain. In the face of this threat the people of the four nations were encouraged, through contemporary mass media publications like cartoons and plays, to see themselves as ‘British’. The French forces were eventually overcome at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Its commander Lord Nelson became a national hero and almost sacred figure after his death, and cities raced to build memorials to this new national hero. David returns to Dublin to discover that this city was the first to commemorate Nelson with a huge statue. But the ultimate - and violent - fate of Nelson’s statue in Dublin revealed the fault lines that continued to exist in Ireland between those who supported union and those who wanted to see an end to British rule.
- Genre
- History; Religion; Government
How to cite this record
The Open University, "Union With David Olusoga". https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ou/search/index.php/prog/246885 (Accessed 09 Jan 2025)